You will spend more on the rest of the computer to do it than if you had bought the i7 in the first place. You will also spend more on electricity to power your PC. Yes you will gain a little CPU capacity over a stock i7, I can't deny that. However you haven't provided any example of an everyday gaming or computing scenario that saturates an i7 and justifies all the extra expense, energy consumption and hassle. Don't get me wrong, I was clocking the snot out of a 2500 Barton back in the day like everyone else, I just think the cost/benefit ratio isn't there anymore when you look at how far hardware is past software right now.Reply

"All the extra expense"... how much do you think it costs? With an unlocked multiplier on the CPU's, its quite easy to overclock and doesn't incur much added expense. Any halfway decent motherboard that has the features you want on it is going to be fully capable of overclocking quite a bit anyway. The electricity difference is going to still be there, but is probably fairly small.. Maybe 20-30W ? With TDP's on the Intel chips these days, it really doesn't take a big cooler to cool them, even if overclocked. A CM Hyper 212+ can be bought for something like $20 and does the job really well. Lots of people would be buying an HSF capable of handling the additional heat anyway. You could easily build a rig capable of overclocking for less than it would cost to jump to a high-end i7 and get equal or better performance.Reply

So if I'm building a new system, and the game I'm likely to play will have a cpu bottleneck with an i5-4670, its cheaper for me to spend more on upgrading to a locked i7-4770 for $90 more and get a few frames increase at best? Why would it not be better to take that same $90 and get a i5-4670k and a mobo that can adjust the multiplier? If an i5 is bottlenecked then getting any locked i7 will do nothing. Its far better to get an unlocked i5 and OC it to reduce the bottle neck. yes, the mobo will cost a little more, but the jump from an i5 to an i7 is still more expensive than getting a i5 k and mobo. Reply

It depends what you do. If you overclock and get another 25% performance, that enables you to complete 5 tasks in the same time as 4. If the reward for doing that task is more than the cost of the electricity, then it's a no brainer. This is particularly relevant in the financial industries, where every millisecond counts, or for careers that are throughput limited.

That's just for workloads - gamers are often not worried about the cost of electricity when it comes to pure performance, and overclocking to increase single core performance, particularly in games like Civilization V that respond well to overclocking (http://www.anandtech.com/show/6985/choosing-a-gami... result in a rise of FPS.

There is also the aspect of competitive overclockers, who see it as a challenge to out-overclock their competitors. As mentioned in the review, this is one of the target groups for OC-oriented motherboards, and the motherboard needs to have features to appeal to this crowd.

Just because you do not overclock anymore does not mean that the activity is dead/no longer useful. It is alive and kicking - the amount of pre-overclocked systems on sale today is just one prong of this.

If we talk about Haswell, then we could get about 4.0GHz on 4770 and 4.3-4.6GHz on 4770k. So it is rather 10% than 25%. I wonder what would be the comparison, if your task is able to effectively use TSX, which is missing in 4770k version?

Will we see GPU drivers using TSX? Or games? Are you prepared to make a comparison?Reply

That first sentence is such a load. If you're any sort of enthusiast at all, you're not going to be buying a board with a business-oriented chipset. If you're not an idiot, you're going to buy decent RAM regardless - what extra expense are you talking about?Reply

A consumer use for the internal USB port might be bit-locker whole drive encryption. Truecrypt still doesn't officially support win8; and bit-locker requires one of a TPM (rare on consumer hardware), a USB drive as a keystore, or for the user to enter a 48 digit code (instead of a normal password) at each boot.

I've never liked the idea of an external thumbstick even on a desktop; since you're one idiot borrowing it to copy data from being locked out of your box. An on-board port is a more elegant option than connecting an expansion slot brackets cable to an on board header but leaving the bracket in the case.Reply

I'm disappointed about the copy/paste of the HDMI In from the last review, especially with the lame excuse of being unable to test it due to not owning a console. Seeing as how he is most likely writing the review about this motherboard on a different computer, is it really that difficult to use it as a source and do some basic testing? Do you have to use the CPU graphics to be able to switch to it? Does the HDMI In work well with multiple displays? If you have dual monitors, is it possible to control which one gets switched to the external input?Reply

The lack of enthusiasm on this review is.. palpable. ^^ Can't really blame the reviewer, to be frank. It is a shame that mobo makers are throwing everything but the kitchen sink, which are largely unfinished and useless, in order to justify overpriced Intel boards.

In light of ASrock's emphasis of overclocking capability ("OC Formula"), I find the AT's overclocking verification process to be awfully inadequate. No serious overclocker will consider a POV Ray run and an unidentified OCCT run as proof of successful overclock.

One more nitpick is that Video/Audio-IN via HDMI was not tested. It seems like the most interesting feature among the bazillion junks ASrock dumped in this board. The reviewer is candid about it, which I appreciate, but it still doesn't make the review complete since the rest of stuff is not very interesting (and it is unclear whether they even work without hitches, since they were not tested) and, as aforementioned, the board's OC-ability wasn't really "tested."

So after reading this review, the board seems like a today's average board, which comes with lots of useless and half-baked features that simply fill in the questionable checkboxes.Reply